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2025-04-11

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  • Pieces we would like to commission

    Plant breeding. Most of the plants we eat today are completely unrecognizable from their distant relatives before human cultivation. We’d like to read the multi-millenia story of a plant from when humans first started eating it to its modern form.

    Horse breeding. There is a lot of money in breeding elite racing horses. We presume, therefore, that there is a wealth of interesting information about horse genetics and how we created the elite racing horses of today. We’d like to read a story on how horses have gotten better (or worse) over time.

    • Along with many more interesting ideas.

  • Understanding US Power Outages - by Brian Potter

    Modern civilization relies on electric power for almost everything, and even small disruptions to electric service are incredibly disruptive. Because of this, we demand a high level of reliability in electrical service. In 2023, the average US electricity customer was without power for only 366 minutes over the course of the year, equivalent to a service uptime of more than 99.9%. Other countries do even better: in 2021 the average German customer was without power for just over 12 minutes, an uptime of greater than 99.997%.

  • Modular housing may have its day – as solution to wildfire rebuilding

  • Helicopter Crashes in the Hudson River in New York City

    There were four people on board the helicopter that crashed into the Hudson River, law enforcement sources said.

  • Planes collide with members of Congress on board at DC airport weeks after crash

    New York Representative Nick LaLota, who was on Flight 4522 to JFK, said the plane he was on was parked when another jet suddenly struck its wing while taxiing. "Serving in Congress has come with some once in a lifetime experiences… like just now while stationary on the runway at DCA, another plane just bumped into our wing," the Congressman posted on X.

Horseshit

celebrity gossip

  • Sarah Palin, New York Times to face off in defamation retrial | Reuters

    A retrial in Palin's nearly eight-year-old lawsuit is scheduled to begin on Monday in Manhattan federal court. Palin, 61, who was defeated in her 2008 bid for the nation's second-highest office, lost her first trial against the Times and former editorial page editor James Bennet in 2022.

Obit

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

Bluesky

  • Adobe and Photoshop get Bullied out of Bluesky

    Adobe, a company known for greed and predatory tactics for milking every single cent out of artists while delivering some of the buggiest pieces of “software” ever made, and stealing your intellectual property for A.I., has recently tried to tip their toes on bluesky to promote their products. And in a funny twist, the community response was SO BAD, they deleted the post and seemgly abandoned their accounts.

Musk

Electric / Self Driving cars

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

Economicon / Business / Finance

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

  • House passes bill restricting district court judges from issuing nationwide injunctions.

  • Johnson says Republicans "have the votes" to pass budget resolution - CBS News

  • Does Social Security have a dead beneficiary problem after all?

    , SSA appears to have looked at a sample of very-old beneficiaries, not the total population. That’s reasonable, since confirming life or death is labor-intensive. But, in that case, the relevant figure isn’t 202, the number of dead beneficiaries SSA found. It’s 18.2 percent, which is the percentage of age 100+ beneficiaries SSA examined that turned out to be dead. If that percentage turns out to be true – and, again, I’m having a hard time believing it – then SSA has a real problem on its hands. These figures would imply that over 16,000 dead Americans aged 100+ are currently collecting benefits. At an average monthly amount of about $1,776, according to SSA’s publicly-available data, that’s real money – about $340 million in lost benefits per year. Again, not the end of the world in a $1.6 trillion dollar annual Social Security benefit bill, but this may not be the end of the story. What if the dead beneficiary problem weren’t restricted to individuals aged 100 and over. Why not a person who died at age 85, but whose death wasn’t reported to SSA? Presumably the dead-beneficiary rate would be much lower, but there also are a lot more Americans in this age group. You can see where this is going, and the numbers are potentially large.

  • House approves Senate blueprint for 'big, beautiful' Trump budget bill after conservative rebellion

    House Republicans adopted a compromise budget resolution Thursday, allowing them to finally start the legislative process of drafting President Trump’s “big, beautiful” agenda package. The measure cleared the lower chamber in a 216-214 vote, with just two Republicans — Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) — opposing it after additional GOP skeptics were assured the final bill would have enough spending cuts for their liking. Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate will now hash out a final bill that could raise the nation’s debt ceiling by as much as $5 trillion, extend President Trump’s tax cuts, and add hundreds of billions of dollars in defense and border security spending.

    Massie, the Republican from Garrison who represents Northern Kentucky, voted against the measure because it didn't cut the federal deficit enough. "We have no plan whatsoever to balance the budget other than growth, but what they're proposing is to make the deficit worse," said Massie, according to USA Today. Massie wears a pin on his lapel displaying the total federal debt constantly ticking up.

Trump

Democrats

Left Angst

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

  • (Apr 2) (PDF) Matt Blaze Testimony on Typhoon Cyberattack

    The CALEA wiretap mandates, while well-intentioned, are showing their age and effectively degrade the security of US telecommunications infrastructure. The interfaces provided by CALEA, and the services that have evolved around them, were a significant enabler of Salt Typhoon, a major cyber-intelligence operation against the United States. Similar attacks are likely to occur in the future unless significant changes are made.

    Ultimately, is time to re-think CALEA. Requiring new services to be engineered with wiretapping as a central requirement is dangerous, and requiring wiretap interfaces to be present in every switch serving every customer is effectively an open invitation to foreign adversaries. At a minimum, CALEA should be revised incorporate rigorous security testing, reviewed on an ongoing basis and as new services and equipment are introduced. And the capabilities should be required to be off by default, rather than enabled even in facilities where no wiretaps are active.

  • Hackers spied on 100 US bank regulators’ e-mails for over a year | The Straits Times

  • He Was Held Captive in His Room for Decades. Then He Set It on Fire. - The New York Times

    He had been trapped for two decades, forced to defecate into newspapers and to funnel his urine out the second-story window. He hadn’t seen a doctor or a dentist in 20 years. Sometimes he was fed a sandwich. His teeth were so decayed they often broke when he ate. He was 5-foot-9, but he weighed only 68 pounds. The ride in the ambulance, he said, was the first time he had been let out of the house since he was 12.

    For years before the man’s disappearance, his teachers, classmates, neighbors and his elementary school principal all believed he was suffering silently. They repeatedly called the Waterbury Police and the Connecticut Department of Children and Families to intercede for a child they said was so hungry that he ate from the trash and stole his classmates’ food. Many reports that may have documented these calls have since been lost, but what records remain show that responding authorities determined the boy was doing OK. After a while, without turning up any evidence of abuse, the calls stopped coming. In fact, until the fire, the last recorded police visit concerning the boy on Blake Street was April 18, 2005, in response to a call placed by his own father. He summoned officers to complain that he was being harassed by people continually checking up on his child.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

World

Israel

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

China

Health / Medicine

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

  • Pollen peril: how heat, thunder and smog are creating deadly hay fever seasons

  • Insects from the 70s were already collecting microplastics

  • Bonobos create phrases in similar ways to humans – new study suggests

  • Bad dog? The environmental effects of owned dogs

    While the impact of cats, both feral and owned, on biodiversity has been relatively well-studied, by contrast, the comparative effect of owned dogs has been poorly acknowledged. the environmental impacts of owned dogs are extensive and multifarious: they are implicated in direct killing and disturbance of multiple species, particularly shore birds, but also their mere presence, even when leashed, can disturb birds and mammals, causing them to leave areas where dogs are exercised. Furthermore, scent traces and urine and faeces left by dogs can continue to have this effect even when dogs are not present. Faeces and urine can transfer zoonoses to wildlife and, when accumulated, can pollute waterways and impact plant growth. Owned dogs that enter waterways contribute to toxic pollution through wash-off of chemical ectoparasite treatment applications. Finally, the sheer number of dogs contributes to global carbon emissions and land and fresh water use via the pet food industry. We argue that the environmental impact of owned dogs is far greater, more insidious, and more concerning than is generally recognised.

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